"Jesus Christ, this feels like the Marines again. 'Here's your boots, here's some clothing, now go do some dangerous shit.'"
George's southern-Maryland twang made me laugh as I turned around to face him in line.
"No, I'm serious, y'all! 'Course, they weren't this godawful ugly color."
I looked down at the ridiculous boots we were issued and wondered why in the hell anyone would want to climb into a set of plastic footie pajamas and do Hazardous Materials work within their Fire Department.
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The backboards just kept coming down the line, the limp figures strapped atop them only serving to make us work faster. As we pulled the next body down the lumber-mill wheeled track set about waist high, I grabbed a sponge and began wiping off whatever particular contaminant was on this one. Someone else pulled a spray nozzle hanging from the ceiling, and we watched the water run down around the elevated platform inside "the hot zone." Our suits were covered in contaminated water, but there was no time to try and clean ourselves off—other team members were busy dragging victims towards us as fast as they could triage them and cut off their clothing.
Not too far away, more Tyvek-clad figures moved with the slow deliberation of astronauts as they spun in circles to be washed down. Their shift was over, and they were being decontaminated by the rest of our team. Scrub brushes and hoses were scattered around the "warm" (contamination reduction) area, and eventually the outgoing team was cleared to take off their gear and recover inside the "cold" zone.
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This was our first exercise for the day, as we learned how to decontaminate (or "decon," for short) both civilians and fellow team members after working in an area exposed to a simulated chemical or biological agent.
The second half of the day also felt decidedly military in nature. Apparently, manufacturers of chemical agent testing devices (think the strange looking devices you see on TV) are unable to call anything by a brand name. The M256 Chemical Agent Detector Kit. M8 colorimetric paper, and it's stickier counterpart, M9 tape. The CAM (a 1987-era Chemical Agent Monitor), as well as it's 21st-century big brother (the APD2000). And of course, who could forget the AP2C: the only portable chemical agent detector in the world that can identify solids, liquids, and gases with no currently known false positives.
The facility they bussed us to today was an old military storage warehouse, which has been converted into an indoor training location complete with faux railroad tracks running through it and wall-sized prints of storefronts to add a small-town authenticity.
Our instructors are top-notch, and we're continually being hyped up about Thursday's live-agent training. We received a briefing today about our time at the COBRA facility, and we're all excited by the opportunity to experience something of this caliber. I mean, you can learn how to scrub someone down almost anywhere; Thursday is what will make this week really stand out from anything we've ever done.
Edit: Ugh, sorry about the colors on these. Not only are the boots really weird (they're more pink or salmon-colored than the vibrant orange seen here), but it was also a pain in the ass to adjust white balance for the off-color fluorescents that bathe the entire facility. I just couldn't get it right!
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